8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
1/28
ETHICS& THE ENVIRONMENT, 15(1) 2010 ISSN: 1085-6633
TIdy WHITENESSA GeneAloGy of RAce, PuRity, And
HyGiene
daNa BERTHOld
While ideals o racial purity may be out o ashion, other sorts o purity
ideals are increasingly popular in the United States today. The theme
o purity is noticeable everywhere, but it is especially prominent in our
contemporary xation on health and hygiene. This may seem totally un-
related to issues o racism and classism, but in act, the purveyors o
purity draw upon the same themes o physical and moral purity that
have helped produce white identity and dominance in the US. Histori-cally, this is where the purity rhetoric gets its power. To invoke purity
ideals in the US is to mobilize this genealogy o racialized associations.
Todays zealous preoccupation with hygiene is part o our living heritage
in a racist culture.
Just as ideas o race and racial purity were debunked by biologists
long beore the public would begin to question them, ideals o extreme
hygienic purity linger with us, even fourish, despite scientic evidence
o their utility and harm. Why are we still so enamored with purity?
Because, to some extent, our very sel-conceptions are at stake. Other
scholars have described how our process o sel individuation is based
upon exclusion. The unique contribution o a genealogical approach to
this issue is that, instead o merely locating the problem in ideologies
held by others, it can evoke sel-recognition and sel-transormation. We
will tend to assume the problem lies elsewhere until we learn to recog-
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
2/28
nize ourselves in practices that reproduce cultural ideals. As inheritors o
this racist culture, we are all lovers o purity, and we are all responsible
or rethinking this value.
Critical race theorists have done much in recent years to show that
contrived and repressive notions o racial purity have been central to the
social identity o whiteness in the US. Similarly, eminists know that con-
trived and repressive notions o sexual purity (that is, chastity) have been
central to the social construction o emininity, especially white eminin-
ity. While it may be clear that these abstract purity ideals have privileged
certain subjects over others, what is even more interesting, and less doc-
umented, are the ways in which everyday purity ideals bite their own
tails, that is, they undermine their proessed purpose in concrete ways.Thus, even the privileged subjects suer. Looking around, we can see
that Americans1 today are still preoccupied with purity ideals in various
ormsnotably, physical hygiene. Purity ideals, ostensibly so healthy and
clean, pervade many contemporary American practices, wherein they be-
tray themselves by making us sick.
One way that purity ideals can make us sick is in a physical sense. Our
most common and seemingly prudent o purity ideals, extreme hygiene,
is ultimately unhealthy. We are encouraged to be overly anxious about
germs and other contaminants, and marketers present us with productsdeemed pure or our consumption. Today, we are sold purity by way o
bottled water and antibacterial soap. Judging by the overwhelming suc-
cess o such products, we are all lovers o purity. But many o these prod-
ucts are actually making us less healthy, in some cases by weakening ourimmune systems, in others by adding toxins to the environment. Then
why do we still hold on to exaggerated ideals o hygienic purity?
Motivations or such purity ideals may be more obvious to us when
we look into our past. In the early US, cleanliness was associated explicitlywith civility, high class, and whiteness. Whiteness, as it has come down to
us, is conceived in part as a sort o physical hygienethe lack o a mark
o pollution. The lack o a mark physically has symbolized the lack o a
mark morally, and this, in turn, has helped bolster a dominant identity.
When we look at purity ideals as having not only physical but also moral
aspects, we can see how easily slippage takes place between the exclusion
o dirt and the exclusion o dirty people. The unction o purity ideals
is rarely just about physical dirtit is about wielding power over im-
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
3/28
pure others. The slippage is not to be unexpected, nor can it be avoided
entirely. As we will see, usage o the word pure in the normative sense
(i.e. conerring value) actually preceded, and remains embedded within,
usage o the word pure in a descriptive sense. But because purity idealsare usually presented as merely descriptive, the slippage, and the ethical
sickness o hierarchical exclusion gets concealed.
There are vast bodies o literature criticizing historical notions o ra-
cial purity (e.g. the one-drop rule2) and eminine sexual purity. That work
has been the inspiration and oundation o the present inquiry. My project
advances the discussion by addressing the connection to purity ideals that
are more common today. One purpose o this article is to demonstrate
that our cultures association between whiteness and purity is alive and
well. More signicantly, however, this article aims to show that the reasonthose ideals still manage to fourishdespite ample evidence that purity
ideals are unhealthy or our bodies and our environmentis because they
reinorce our still-racialized socio-economic hierarchy. Even those o us
who readily admit a strong historical link between hygiene and racismnd ourselves resistant to the idea that our own preoccupation with hy-giene has some racist roots. The widespread popularity o purity ideals
in the US means that all o us, not just elites, routinely reproduce our
cultures love o purity. Purity ideals fourish because o their exceptional
ability to masquerade as the most healthy and innocent o ideals, even
while they conjure up and revitalize our racist heritage.
Other scholars have examined purity ideals as organizing principles
behind both social order and sel-conception. While this approach gives us
valuable insight into the tenacity o purity ideals, in doing so it has oten
relied upon an abstract analysis o the logic o purity. My intention here
is to show that another approach, a genealogical approach, can provide
a critique that is more radical by virtue o its practicality. Genealogy can
have a proound infuence on purity ideals precisely because o its con-creteness. It helps us use our own practical experience to ask ourselves,
what are our values up to? Are they causing insidious side eects, morally
and physically? My examples will show how, because o their genealogi-
cal tie to purity discourses in our white supremacist history, todays purity
ideals can unction subtly to reproduce the status quo when it comes to
race, class, and the environment.
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
4/28
Lugones and The Lover of PuriTy
Mary Douglas (1970) and Mara Lugones (1994) have both written
important accounts o how purity ideals acilitate the ordering o social
lie in ways that benet dominant groups. Douglas, rom an anthropo-logical perspective, recounts (but does not so much criticize) the unc-
tioning o specic purity rituals in various cultures. Lugones, in Purity,
Impurity, and Separation, sets her own analysis apart: it is not [Doug-
lass] purpose to distinguish between oppressive and non-oppressive
structuring. My purpose here is precisely to understand the particular
oppressive character o the modern construction o social lie, and the
power o impurity in resisting and threatening this oppressive structur-
ing (1994, 285). Lugones then goes on to demystiy that oppressive
structuring via an abstract analysis o logic o purity. I Douglass ap-
proach is concrete without criticism, Lugoness approach achieves criti-
cism, but primarily at a conceptual level. My approach oers a missing
piece o this discussion by providing criticism o purity ideals at a con-
crete level.
I nd Lugoness account valuable in describing how we come to
inhabit dierent sorts o subjectivity based on dierential positions o
power and identity. I think she is right that an urge or control and an
assumption o unity are behind the sel-conception o the dominantsubject, who she says is a lover o purity (1994, 280). But privileged
individuals o the dominant culture do not, o course, literally begin with
anything they would consciously call an urge or control or an assump-
tion o unity. This being the case, then, my question becomes: what specic
discursive practices, what kinds o values do we actually espouse that helpconstitute such sel-conceptions? Are there concrete ways (or example,by over-using disinectants), in which this privileged subject literally lovespurity? How can these practices be explained? And do only elite individu-
als love purity, or are we all lovers o purity?Lugones does encourage us, in active resistance to the logic o purity,
to be more concrete. In closing her article, Lugones oers suggestions
o concrete ways that readers might resist the dominant logic o purity
through intentional acts o impurity. But I dont think that the only way
to resist the logic o purity is by privileging its opposite. A genealogical
analysis reveals that these purity ideals ultimately betray their own logic
in tangible ways. Such an analysis shows that a preoccupation with purity
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
5/28
is unhealthy, both physically and morally. It makes our bodies and our sel
conceptions sick. We can see this through our concrete experience.
geneaLogyA genealogical approach can advance this discussion by showing how
purity ideals, such as extreme hygiene, are reproduced through popular
discursive practices. Genealogy does not proclaim in advance that certain
values, such as purity, are always or necessarily bad. Instead, it gives us
the tools to inquire about the unctioning o those values through con-
crete examples. Examples are more than just illustrations o a concept.
They are the lie o the concept. And as such, they are also the means o
its undoing. For instance, I will be considering things that our culture has
deemed pure, such as bottled water and antibacterial soap. I these thingsare not indeed pure, then what unction is served by our belie that they
are? Genealogy is more than anthropology, and more than a history o
ideas, because o its critical orce. By inquiring into the values and prac-
tices that help produce our sel-conceptions, genealogy seeks historicized
sel-understanding and transormation as part o the critical process. It
cultivates a critical orientation that aids us in the continual work o ree-
dom (Foucault 1984, 46).As Nietzsche emphasized, we should be willing
continually to revaluate our values (1989 [1887], 20).To the extent thatwe unrefectively uphold dubious values, we are less ree, and we lock
ourselves into a status quo social order.
As we take a closer look at purity ideals, we will nd that most oten
they depend upon a dubious metaphysical purity. In other words, physical
and moral purity ideals both presuppose (and aim at a return to) oun-
dational, prepolitical and metaphysically distinct categories3 that turn out,
upon investigation, to be nothing o the sort. In the next section, our ge-
nealogy will reveal that dirt is a relative concept. Bodies are not pure,
identities are not pure, and moral circumstances are not pure. A genealo-gist is then led to inquire what unction a belie in purity actually serves.Historical examples will demonstrate that purity ideals unction to create
and reinorce social identities and socio-economic hierarchies, by ration-
alizing exclusion. In other words, when we explore the genealogy o ideas
o dirt and corollary purity ideals, we most oten nd their beginnings
in political and economic power dynamics, and the dirty task o keep-
ing power or the elite. Why seek these origins? A genealogist supposes
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
6/28
that when we are more refective about the unctions o our cultural prac-
tices, we are more ree to change those patterns. I we can identiy purity
ideals in many o our common interactions, we will be better prepared to
challenge the conceptual patterns and values that perpetuate hierarchicaldivisions.
To say that purity ideals are important aspects o white identity is not
to say that they are embraced consciously or explicitly by all (or only)
white people. I will be making the case, rather, that physical and moral
purity ideals orm popular discursive practices that help reproduce white
identity, which is ormulated to reinorce white dominance. I use dis-
course in the larger sense employed by Foucault (1972) and Butler (1993),
without implying a strict separation o linguistic and material realms. The
term discursive practices highlights the act that all practices have adiscursive lie, just as discourse has a practical lie. Understanding purity
ideals as discursive practices helps us recognize ourselves within them. We
consume and reproduce this ideal. In a culture preoccupied with purity,
we are all conditioned to some extent to be lovers o purity we are
shaped by purity ideals, but also we are the agents responsible or analyz-
ing and redeploying or undoing them.
CLeanLiness and seLf-ConCePTions
Since purity is primarily a negative concept, that is, dened by what
it is not, it is instructive to examine ideas o what constitutes impurity,that is, pollution, or dirt. Ater researching various cultures on this point,
Douglas nds that there is no such thing as absolute dirt (1970, 12). Dirt
is relative. In other words, peoples o dierent cultures have produced di-
erent denitions o what is to be avoided, or what constitutes a matter
out o placewhether that means clutter, germs, or some other orm o
contamination. This supports the insight that a concern or hygiene does
not always, as it purports, truly serve physical health. I this were the case,we would probably nd the same set o unhealthy things to be avoided by
all humans alike, since presumably health relates to our universally shared
physiology. Instead, we nd considerable variability between cultures.
In America today, the dirt with which we seem most concerned is
microscopic, and there is a popular obsession over hygienic purity. Amer-
icans are excessively, needlessly, even recklessly clean. Our stores carry
whole aisles ull o brightly-packaged cleaning and hygiene products. We
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
7/28
are oered antibacterial writing utensils, toothbrush holders, and shop-
ping-cart wipes. We bathe more oten and consume more detergents,
disinectants, and deodorants than any other identiable group on the
planet. People who do not shower at least once a day can be considereddirtythis is outlandish by just about any other historical or cultural
standard.
It may seem contradictory to claim both that dirt is relative and that
Americans are excessively clean. However, I am not judging the impropri-
ety o cleanliness based on arbitrary standards, but based on Americans
own sense o what we desire out o our cleanlinessnamely, most oten,
good health. Our hygienic preoccupation is not making us healthier, and
yet, we are orever trying to make ourselves cleaner. This should tell us
there may be something else at work.A problem with such hyper-cleanliness is illustrated through the re-
cent craze over antibacterial soaps. Since the 1990s, antibacterial soaps
have become the most widely available liquid soaps on American grocery
and drug store shelves. While public concern about germs has been a a-
miliar part o our culture at least since germ theory developed in the late
19th century, increasing ater World War II with new developments in im-
munology,4 only recently has it reached a level where the public is willing
to believe it needs antibiotics in its handsoap. This is truly unwarrantedwhile hand-washing is a good idea, regular soap is perectly eective.
Doctors and health ocials themselves oten use regular soap, because
they know that antibacterial soap can have harmul eects, akin to the
harmul eects o swallowing antibiotics or any small illness. The main
bacterialthreats to our health are E. coli and salmonella, and threateningquantities are almost always inside ood, not on our hands. So, bacteria-
killing agents in handsoap are not really helping us. Doctors do worryabout two strains o bacteria that are spread by touching suracesbut
they are only ound in hospitals. And anyway, most winter illnesses areviral, not bacterial (Kolata 2001). While doctors and scientists know bet-
ter than to think antibiotics will serve every ailment, or that it is important
or handsoap kill bacteria, the public still enthusiastically demands these
products. A lot o it is not based on science, says Dr. Jerey S. Duchin,
chie o the Communicable Disease Control, Epidemiology and Immuni-
zation Section o the public health department o Seattle. It is based on
our national psyche and what we value purity and cleanliness (Kolata
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
8/28
2001). This value, then, pits us against our microscopic surroundings in
general. Despite our hostility, most o the germs and dirt that we co-
exist with are harmless (indeed, oten benecial) components o our eco-
logical system. Regardless, we go on generating and consuming all kindso toxic germ-killers, ultimately harming ourselves. The ingredients that
go into pesticides, and disinectants, and single-use packaging are causing
cancer and ecological degradation. The byproducts o chlorine bleach, or
example, are retained in atty tissue and have been linked to cancers in
humans and other animals. Further, our lack o exposure to germs can
actually inhibit robust development o our immune systems. For example,
recent studies show that children are more likely to develop asthma i they
have been generally kept rom the outdoors and live inside very clean,
disinected homes (Rowlands 2002). Finally, over-use o germ-killers cancreate unhealthy environments by killing benecial bacteria while breed-
ing resistant strains o disease-causing onessuper-germs.
I do not mean to minimize the act that basic sanitation cuts down on
the communication o certain diseasesat times we have needed meas-
ures like the Pure Foods Act o 1906 to counter real public health threats
that resulted rom lack o sanitation. Nonetheless, today we have met
that basic sanitation mark and, in many regards, gone ar beyond. The
hyperbolic excess to which Americans have taken the need or hygiene is
medically unjustied, even counterproductive. Certainly, some degree o
concern about germs derives rom a reasonable ear o disease. However,
it is dicult to make sense o all the unhealthy, excessive germ-phobia
without an understanding o the residue o associations with cleanliness
in our racist past.
On a deeper level, all this excess anxiety tells us something about our
national psyche, our popular model o sel-conception. This sel-con-
ception relies upon certain distinctions, which, because they are allible,
produce certain anxieties. In particular, we are anxious about our discrete-ness as individual selves, about the not-sel (or other), and about dirt.
These three concepts and the anxieties about maintaining them are inter-
dependent and mutually reinorcing. But generally speaking, dirt is the
derivative concept, substituting or, and thereby rationalizing, the some-
times distasteul but necessary aspect o rejecting the other. I will return
to this in the next section. For now, we must understand the dominant
sel-conception o the contemporary American. In this conception, the
proper and healthy state o the human body is a physical unmixedness,
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
9/28
or purity. This entails the idea that the boundaries o our bodies are natu-
rally discrete and hostile like ortress walls. There is an important sense
in which, however, thesel does not exist as such prior to the abjection
o elements that get designated as non-sel. Julia Kristeva (1982) describesthis process as both corporeal and symbolic, erecting boundaries o both
ones body and ones subjectivity. In order to maintain the boundary, the
non-sel must be abjected continually. This means it remains a continual
threat. And strictly speaking, it can never go away completely, because,
like the pollution without which purity is incomprehensible, the abjected
elements actually constitute the clean and proper sel. Judith Butler hascalled this unction the constitutive outside, because o the productive
role it continually plays in drawing the contours o the sel (1993, 3).
In theearly history o the US, this outside was certain people deemedother. Now, germs and other kinds o dirt have become ritualized as
a constitutive outside or the contemporary American.
It is important to historicize and locate the subject we are describing
here. The subject whose sense o sel is constituted in this way could be, as
many have suggested, the subject o the modern western era. This would
be the abstract individual, puried o any dirt, any mark o specicity,
and this oten turns out to mean (as Lugones points out) any marker o a
marginalized identity. Others would locate the beginning o purity-based
sel-conceptions much earlier, or example, in the Judaic tradition as ex-
emplied in Leviticus. The dominant subject o Americas mainstream cul-
ture does o course have roots in these traditions. However, the particular
orm that our sel-understandings take in America today is unique in ways
that can only be understood in relation to our own historyparticularly,
I will be arguing, the history o American race relations. This is not to
say that America is more concerned with purity than allother cultures,but that when we evoke purity ideals here, we conjure up (and some-
times reproduce, sometimes redeploy) a particular set o relations andexclusions. This genealogy aims to demonstrate how these relations are
harming us, even those o us who are ostensibly privileged by the current
arrangement.
PhysiCaL and MoraL PuriTy: dirT and dirTy PeoPLe
Generally speaking, the concern or hygienic discipline makes sense
within a tradition that has valued mind (or spirit) over body, and culture
(or civilization) over material nature. As Freud reminds us, control over
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
10/28
the orces o nature is the how civilization understands itsel (1961, 47).
In the US, with our particular history o hierarchical relations, this has
produced representations o whiteness as mind/spirit and civilization, and
non-whiteness as primitive embodiment, closer to nature.Control o the orces o nature has also meant control over those
who are closer to nature. Similarly, control o dirt slips rom the physical
to the moral realm. As Douglas points out, dirt is relative, but this should
not imply that dirt is random. Rather, she claims, dirt is always part o
a system (1970, 48). Dirt, contamination, or pollution are labels likely
to be associated with behaviors that all outside o, and thereby threaten,
our most careully guarded categories o social classication, including
races, classes, genders, and sexualities. This is why dirtiness has not only
physical but moral implications. In the US, then, it should come as no sur-prise that white people, the group with social and economic dominance,
have conceived o themselves as pure, both physically and morally. Dyer
notes the irony in this. White people are neither literally nor symboli-
cally white. We are not the colour o snow or bleached linen, nor are we
uniquely virtuous and pure (1997, 42). But because dirt is relative, we
should keep in mind that there is no distinction (as Dyer implies there is)
between literal and symbolic dirtit is all symbolic. This is exactly whythe slippage so easily occurs between what gets represented as physical
dirt and what gets represented as moral dirt. Strictly speaking, it is not
really slippage at all, i by that we mean accidental transerence to a di-
erent concept. It is only slippage in the sense o ostensibly ignoring (and
yet oten exploiting) connotations that are embedded within the concept
as its oundation.
According to the Oxord English Dictionary, the wordpurity has twomain denotations: rst, it is the state o being unmixed; reedom rom ad-
mixture o any oreign substanceesp. reedom rom matter that contam-
inates, deles, corrupts, or debases. Notice that this denition conjoinsthe idea ooreignness with the idea odelement. The second denotationlisted under purity in the OED is said o persons: Freedom rom moralcorruption, rom ceremonial or sexual uncleanness, or pollution; stainless
condition or character; innocence, chastity (1989). Purity, then, has two
major strands o denition: purity in the sense o unmixedness and purity
in the sense o virtue. The ormer, descriptive sense (unmixedness) is today
usually understood as the concepts value-ree origin. In other words, we
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
11/28
tend to believe that rst we identied an unmixed class o things, and
second, we judged that class to be valuable. However, the etymology o
the word indicates that the latter, normative sense (moral virtue) actu-
ally came rst in usage. This implies that the descriptive sense o purityas unmixed was made to appear as a natural category only ater the acto social relations. This assumption o a value-ree conceptual origin can
serve to cover over the value-laden, politically motivated basis o much
purity rhetoric. While we should be wary o the slippage between moral
and physical senses o the word, I do not believe they can be held distinct
entirely, because purity, like dirt is a symbolic concept that exists to
morally reinorce our sel-conceptions and the exclusions they entail.
The linguistic genealogy o the link between whiteness and moral
purity reaches back beore the ounding o the US. The OEDs seventhmeaning o white is morally and spiritually pure (esp. when compared
to something black). The word air means both light and right.5 A white
lie is an innocent lie. Whiteness is cleanliness, purity, the absence o a
stain or mark. Franz Fanon reminds us, In Europe Satan is black, one
talks o the shadow, when one is dirty one is blackwhether one is think-
ing o physical dirtiness or moral dirtinessblackness, darkness, shadow,
shades, night, and the labyrinths o the earths, abysmal depths, blacken
someones reputation; and on the other side, the bright look o innocence,
the white dove o peace, magical, heavenly light (Fanon 1967, 18889).
While reerences to people o a white race did not rst occur in English
until the 17th century, pale skin was already a symbol o innocence and
virtue. In Renaissance paintings o Christ and the Virgin Mary, they are
regularly depicted as paler than others, and even sometimes appear to emit
light (Dyer 1997, 6667). In the US these symbolic associations became
explicitly tied to race, helping whites to justiy it as a caste system.
This strong association between whiteness, cleanliness, and moral vir-
tue in America comes out in an appalling ad or Ivory soap that circulatedaround the end o the 19th century (gure 1). Depicted in the ad are three
Native Americans dressed in Euro-American clothing, sparkling clean and
civilized thanks to Ivory soap. The script ends with these lines: And now
were civil, kind and good; And keep the laws as people should; We wear
our linen, lawn and lace; As well as olks with paler ace; And now I take,
whereer we go; This cake o IVORY SOAP to show; What civilized my
squaw and me; And made us clean and air to see (Procter and Gamble
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
12/28
1883). This ad communicates that the non-white bodies o Natives are
unclean, both morally and physically. They are impure. They are a savage
threat to the boundaries o American civilization. They must be puried,
Figure 1. Excerpt rom advertising pamphlet or Ivory Soap. (Proctor andGamble 1883)
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
13/28
or civilization must puriy itsel othem. The racism in this ad is couchedin the simultaneous oppositions o purity and pollution, cleanliness and
dirt, civilization and savagery, white and dark.6 O course, today we rarely
see such oppositions spelled out so blatantly. But Ivory (among a proli-eration o other cleaning products) still markets itsel as pure. Can the
ideal o purity be cleansed o all these nastier associations? Or is there
something about the organization o the concept o purity that tends to
retain the exclusionary unction even ater the most blatant content is
removed?
An ad on the Ivory soap website calls it Pure clean. Pure IVORY
(Procter and Gamble 1998b). This reers to the slogan that still, since
1879, sells Ivory soap: 99-44/100% PURE . Pure what? The ads never
seem to say explicitlyit doesnt seem to matterpurity is an unques-tionable virtue. The emphasis upon the products physical attributes, such
as its whiteness and its ability to foat (lightness), suggest a link between
these qualities and the consumers virtue. It turns out that Ivory is 99%
pure soap, that is, alkali and lipids. The other raction o a percent isa preservative intended, as the website says, to keep the bar as white
as its name (Procter and Gamble 1998a). It is interesting to note that
Ivorys whiteness does not come naturallyit must be maintained by an
articial preservative. Purity never seems to come naturally, even though
it gets presented as oundational. In the contemporary ad, the connec-
tions between whiteness and physical and moral cleanliness are less direct,
but still present. The ideal o purity still unctions here to secure identity
through an implied gesture o exclusion.
While I do not believe that it is only whites today who participate
in the concern or cleanliness, I do believe that that concern refects the
ormation o a dominant subjectivity, which, because o our history, is
coded white. No subjectivity can emerge outside the context o a his-
torically located group identity. With whiteness, we begin by shutting outnature. The cultural and historical situatedness o the ways that we learn
to dene the sel is illustrated in the ollowing observation made by Na-
tive American philosopher Viola Cordova. Cordovas daughter and her
riend, a white woman, take their new inants outside. The white mother
lays down a clean blanket to act as a barrier between the baby and the
ground. She puts her baby in the center o the blanket, and then surrounds
him with plastic toys, in the hope that he will stay occupied and not crawl
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
14/28
o the blanket. I the baby does break the boundary and start touching
(and tasting) the rocks and grass, he is told Nothat is dirty.7 The Na-
tive mother, on the other hand, encourages her baby to crawl around, to
touch, to taste the grass, to observe the sky and eel the breeze (Cordova1997, 3334).
Besides the act that these two children may develop very dierent
levels o basic immunity to natural pathogens, these children are being
taught very dierent lessons about what is the sel, and what is the proper
interaction between sel and non-sel (or world). Cordova remarks, This
is it. This is why we are dierent. This is how it is done. The white child
learns to identiy with this isolated, abstract, articial environment, and
that whatever is out there is alien and potentially dangerous. Cordovas
grandson, on the other hand, is encouraged to interact with his surround-ings in peaceul curiosity. She concludes, thereore, that his sel/world
boundaries are less acute, and he eels at home, more a part o (ratherthan apart rom) his environment (Cordova 1997, 3334).
I asked, I imagine that the white mother would explain the precau-
tions she takes with her inant as merely hygienic. But as we have seen,
such overzealous protection against germs oten backres, and does not
really promote health. Rather, this excess anxiety about cleanliness engen-
ders a certain conception o what the sel is, a conception linked to white
privilege in our particular time. On one level, this is a sel that is alienated
rom the physical world and thereore aims to subdue the indicators o its
own physical embodiment. In this regard, the sel is anxious about bodily
boundaries because it denes itsel through what it excludes or washesaway. On another level, cleanliness is more abstract and has to do with
belie in one groups moral superiority over another group considered less
civilized and closer to nature. On both levels, the alienated other is what
makes this sel a sel. The theme o absence or exclusion converges whites
abstract subjectivity with the physical and moral purity ideals o whiteidentity. While this may grant the white sel a certain experience o unity,
it is in act alienatedit has ractured itsel, declared itsel cut o rom the
interrelations and dependencies that created it, that sustain it. Those dam-
aged relationships are not only environmental, but also socio-economic
and interracial. Our anxieties about our conceptions o sel, other, and
dirt end up damaging the sel they are meant to bolster.
Cordovas story about the white mother and her baby illustrates that
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
15/28
whiteness is not just an identity that gets ascribed to particular bodies.
It is a practice, and as such, it must be reproduced in little ways every
daylike through our practices o extreme hygiene.
is exTreMe hygiene (aLways) raCisT?
It will be objected that there are many hygienic concerns in America
today that are quite reasonable and totally unrelated to our white su-
premacist history. As I pointed out in the beginning, genealogy does not
begin with an assumption that a certain value is always or necessarily bad.
The point is to examine our ideals more careully, to ask how they are
unctioning in each particular context. There are, o course, times when
we may seek out purity or very practical and unproblematic reasons.
And then there are times when the concern or purity extends beyond itspractical bounds, and the question is, what unction does it then serve?
Consider this example o the purity ideals regarding water.
It is a practical concern to know that pure, distilled H2O will pre-
vent my electric iron rom being ruined by mineral deposits. However, o
course, chemically pure H2O does not appear in nature, nor would water
be good or us to drink without naturally-occurring minerals. So, when
we demand pure water or drinking, we mean something elsethat it
should be ree rom disease-causing germs and toxins. This too appears to
be a practical concern, and yet the concern has ar exceeded any bene-
cial eect on consumer health. Recently, the market or bottled water has
exploded, and purity is by ar the biggest theme in its advertisement. The
main reasons that US consumers cite or drinking bottled water are health
and saety (the taste o the water was only cited as a concern by 7% o
American bottled-water consumers, as opposed to 45% in France) (Fer-
rier 2001, 16). And yet the very low levels (usually harmless) o impurities
in average American tap water are about the same as the levels in average
bottled water. In act, tap water is even subject to stricter regulation thanbottled water in most places. In her 2002 book, Water Wars, VandanaShiva discusses a study o 103 brands o bottled water which were ound
to be, overall, no saer than tap water. A third o the brands contained ar-
senic and E.coli and a ourth merely bottled tap water (Shiva 2002, 100).
For American consumers, the bottle itsel seems to create the reassuring
illusion o a boundary. Susan Willis has put it well: in the First World,
the package is the etishized sign o the desire or purity (1991, 3). Yet
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
16/28
the plastic bottle introduces its own ormidable set o environmental and
health problems, especially in terms o plastics manuacture and disposal.
It may seem that purity is a useul criterion or water. However, it appears
that in the context o contemporary American consumerism, xation onwater purity gets us bottled water (or those who can aord it) rather
than clean streams. While environmental protection standards remain lax,
we are sold bottled water with the rhetoric o purity printed all over it,
and a tamper-resistant seal.
Still, it will be objected that the worry over water purity is about
the real threat o environmental toxins, thereore unrelated to the his-
tory o concern over racial purity. While it is true that pollution is in-
creasingly a problem in general, it is also clear that bottled water is not
a solution to that problem in the ways people tend to assume (in act,it is probably making things worse). And while it is true that advertis-
ers have merely capitalized upon consumers recent ear o environ-
mental toxins, the act remains that that ear o what is out there
was already there to be manipulatedAmericans already had a history
o being excessively concerned about hygiene as a symbol o identity
and status. This arises, as I explained above, rom anxieties about dirt
that must accompany a sel-conception ounded on exclusion. And
our sel-conceptions could not be otherwise, given our violent, racist
past. These anxieties are what the advertisers cash in on when they call
things pure.8
Where no longer truly useul or health, purity ideals serve to exag-
gerate symbolic boundarieswhat is here and what is out there, what is
higher and what is lower. Most oten this is or someones gainin this
case the corporate purveyors o purity (or example Coke and Pepsi, via
Dasani and Aquana). I we believe that we value purity or health rea-
sons, we ought to inquire whether our health is actually being served by
what is called pure. This is what is meant by a revaluation o values.Consider one more example where contemporary advertising capital-
izes upon our excessive concern or purity, this time actually employing
an oblique reerence to our racialized associations with purity and pollu-
tion. A popular light bulb made by GE, Reveal, calls itsel the bulb that
uncovers pure, true light (General Electric 2002). The light is supposed
to be whiter, brighter, and less dingy, thus revealing the pure, true colors
o your world. How does the light bulb do this? The Reveal bulb has a
powder-bluish tint that lters out yellow. The packaging says, Specially
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
17/28
made to lter out yellow rays that hide lies true colors, GE Reveal light
bulbs produce cleaner, whiter-looking light (General Electric 2002).
Now, while it is true that standard incandescent bulbs emit light that
alls largely within the yellow and red ranges, this does not make thelight untrue, unclean, or impure. Natural sunlight varies widely in
color temperature depending on the time o day and the cloud cover. I
am suspicious o this designation o light that is devoid o the yellow/red
portion o the spectrum as pure and natural. In act, it seems to produce
an articially contrived blue/whiteness, along with an increase in contrast
between black and white. The suggestion that whiteness is pure while yel-
low is excessive, harsh, and dirty seems to have ar-reaching implications.
This becomes disturbingly evident when a Reveal commercial shows a
white, blue-eyed baby illuminated under two dierent light bulbs (g-ure 2). Under the regular incandescent light (with yellow), the baby looks
unremarkable. But under the pure light, that babys skin becomes an
ethereal, angelic/ghostly white, and its eyes are a brighter, crisper blue.
The ad directly states that the baby is more beautiul under the whiter
light. The copy goes on to say that colors will be more true, like the
baby blue in your babys eyes (evidently, this bulb may not do much or
Figure 2. Ad rom product website. Copy reads: The amazing GE RevealLight Bulb lters out dull, yellow rays. It leaves only clean, pure light. See
or yoursel how colors look vibrant and true. Especially the baby blue in
your babys eyes. (General Electric Company 2002)
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
18/28
brown-eyed, dark-skinned people). It is worth noting that a particular
spectrum o light that enhances white skin and blue eyes gets called pure
light, when there is nothing pure about it. The choice to represent it as
pure and clean draws upon (and thereby reproduces) our cultures love opurity and its historical association with a white aesthetic in general, and
white skin in particular.
The bulb example shows how a dubious overextension o the purity
ideal, masked as hygienic, is still linked to race in oblique ways, no longer
unconcealed like it was in the old Ivory ad. Hygienic concerns are not
always problematic in themselves. However, because dirt is relative and
or Americans symbolizes our own orders o social classication, then in
order to get beyond subtle racist conditioning we should be wary o the
residue: ideas about exclusion o dirt still slide quickly into ideas aboutexclusion o racialized peoples.
Whether or not one is willing to call extreme hygiene racist will
depend upon the breadth o ones denition o racism. Some believe that
we should only call racist those acts that are consciously perormed in
hatred. I believe it is more helpul to realize that we are all conditioned, in
ways sometimes very subtle, to value the values that shore up the domi-
nance o the ruling class. And as inheritors o our particular racist herit-
age, we are better o admitting that we have been conditioned, however
unconsciously, to view one another in terms o white and nonwhite, and
to value white over nonwhite. Thereore, we are all racist, whether we like
it or not. By admitting this we can begin to ask ourselves how such condi-
tioning is perpetuated, and how it might be thwarted. Extreme hygiene as
a cultural trend, given this broad denition, is racist. At the very least, it is
a oolish tendency that can only be understood in relation to the unique
anxieties generated by a color caste system.
CLeanLiness, CLass, and CoLor CasTeThe earliest etymological root o the word pure, rom Sanskrit, has
to do with cleansing. This has always meant not only physical but also
moral cleanliness. We have all heard that cleanliness is next to godliness.
The Encyclopedia o Domestic Economy stated in 1844 that Cleanli-nesshas moral as well as physical advantagesit is an emblem, i not a
characteristic, o purity o thought and propriety o conduct (Heneghan
2003, 133). Purity and propriety were linked together as classy ideals. In
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
19/28
its purposive distancing rom the laborer who is conceived as dark and
dirty, a dirt-ree hygienic aesthetic coners higher status, partly because
it is expensive. Some might argue that cleanliness is an aesthetic having
much more to do with class than with race. But we can see rom the his-tory o these ideals that the two have been inseparable in America.
In the early US, not only was it the case that upper-class whites could
aordan exaggerated aesthetic o cleanliness, but high-class purity (andmoral propriety) became increasingly tied to the color white in general.
We can see this symbolized through white houses, white china, white lin-
ens, and a range o other ne white things that populated the householdso upper class whites (Heneghan 2003, xii). High class and whiteness are
still so closely linked that poor whites are not considered simply or prop-
erly whiteinstead, they are called white trash, construed as pollutingthe white ideal. That term rst came into usage around the time that the
American eugenics movement was establishing policies aimed at keeping
poor whites and people o color rom reproducing. From 18801920,
the US Eugenics Records Oce produced teen dierent Eugenic Family
Studies wherein the researchers sought to demonstrate scientically that
large numbers o rural poor whites were a dysgenic race unto them-
selves (Newitz and Wray 1997, 2). I white trash were a race unto them-
selves, that would help explain why they exhibited the same ailures as
nonwhite races in achieving the American dream o prosperity.
Sherman Alexie has spoken about growing up in extreme poverty on
the Spokane Indian Reservation. For him, one o the most distinguishing
characteristics o living under those conditions was the lack o good sani-
tation, or as he illustrates it, being orced to smell unpleasant smells. Hetells stories o the lthy outhouse his amily used. He refects that, as a re-
sult, in his adult lie he has become zealously astidious in his housekeep-
ing and personal hygiene habits. (Alexie tells this story ater complaining
that he had to sit next to a smelly hippie on the trainhere is an explicitcase where contempt or dirt extends to a distaste or dirty people)
(2004). This story brings up two points I should clariy and reiterate. First,
there are many virtues to basic sanitation, and being orced to live with-out it is a repugnant (i not lie-threatening) condition imposed upon the
poor. In this sense it is understandable that greater hygiene gets associated
with higher class. However, as I have argued, there is a point at which
concern or hygiene becomes excessive and counterproductive, and at that
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
20/28
point its valorization only enhances exclusive hierarchies. In this country,
the extreme preoccupation with hygiene is not just a personal aesthetic,
nor is it entirely explainable as an ahistorical desire to control ones liv-
ing conditions. This country has a history o extreme preoccupation withhygiene because racializedcleanliness (or example the one-drop ruleand segregation) has been utterly crucial to class statushigh status being
anxiously guarded by whites and truly unattainable or others because othe ways in which it was coded white. This leads to my second point o
clarication: as I have mentioned, it is not only whites who participate inthe exaggerated concern or hygiene. People o color (certain Natives, no
less) sometimes maniest this concern, perhaps precisely because they have
been systematically denied class mobility (while simultaneously being told
to clean up their act and pull themselves up by their bootstraps). Whenwe want to live in clean houses where we control our environs, we mani-
est a reasonable desire to live without poverty and disease. When we are
zealous about hygiene beyond what is practical, we maniest those unique
anxieties o color caste.
For whites, this anxiety is rooted in an actual historical concern to
protect ones class position by guarding against racialized taint. I think
it also derives rom an awareness (perhaps hazy) o the hypocrisy o en-
orcing a caste system within the bounds o America, where we are told
that all men are created equal. To orm a legitimating discourse, it has
been important or whites to believe a contradiction: that it was non-
whites own ault i they didnt clean themselves up (like in the old
Ivory ad) andthey were objectively unable to be clean, because they wereirrevocably tainted. These contradictory belies have been acilitated by
a discourse about hygiene that protects class status by slipping between
ideas o physical and moral propriety.
The supposed racial taint was not just about blood content, but also
about dirtiness in general, a dirtiness conceived as dangerous or whitesto be near. Jane Staord, a white Southern woman who was raised in anearly 20th century household in which the black domestic servants ate
with separate silverware had this to say in the mid-eighties:To this day,
I cant use the silverits not silver, but the silverware the [black] servants
use. I think thats just terrible. I know its just a habit that I have to eat
out o silver, because I dont want to eat out o the servants. Isnt that ri-
diculous? The separate silverware and bathroomthat was done because
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
21/28
they were a dierent race. I dont know when it was begun. I expect it was
always like that. But, o course, a lot o them had syphilis and TB, so there
was that, too, that people always mentioned as a reason. But I think it was
really a racial attitude (Tucker 1988, 177). In these comments, Staordreveals that even while whites probably understood the separation o the
races to be symbolic rather than literally about hygiene, they still carried
out the physical separation o eating utensils and bathrooms under hygi-
enic pretenses. So strong was the resulting association between physical
hygiene and racial/class status that, even late in the 20th century, even
ater refecting on her own illogical prejudices, she cannot bring hersel to
eat with the servants silverware.
The link between Janes story and the story o todays purity-preoc-
cupied consumer is germs. Not only germs, but, as we have seen, the cat-egory o invisible pathogens today extends to encompass environmental
toxins. Janes sense o dirt was explicitly tied to the other, while our ownsense o germs may ostensibly be less so. Still, these stories tap into anxiety
over dirt that takes a violent sel-other distinction as its lineage.
Race scholars have discussed the one-drop rule, segregation, and old
Ivory ads over the last several years. By now, it seems uncontroversial that
in the past, all this purity rhetoric served racist unctions barely below
(and oten above) the surace. However, people are much more reluctant
to recognize that this history has infuenced our own values and our own
sel-conceptions. What remains dicult, but I think crucial to recognize, is
that todays supposedly innocuous preoccupation with hygiene is rooted
in that racist heritage. Today when we buy bottled water or disinectants,
attracted to the rhetoric o purity and unrefective about the actual eects
o those practices, we ourselves are acting out and reproducing the anxie-
ties o this racialized genealogy, and harming ourselves.
ConCLusionBoth physical purity and moral purity ideals, in the past and today,
employ a model o cleansing to promote a sense o the good that de-
pends upon exclusion. Most oten, when we explore the genealogy o such
discursive practices, we nd their beginnings in political and economic
power structures, not in the pure origins they claim. In the cases o the seg-
regationists and eugenicists, this meant overt discrimination against poor
and non-white groups whom they deemed objectively tainted. Thus power
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
22/28
over these other groups was practiced as a sort o cleanliness o body,
and it was practiced with a cleanliness o conscience. Today, the power
that whites as a group continue to exercise over non-whites is acilitated
through these discourses o purity. The American love o hygienic puritytakes place via such everyday items as antibacterial soap, plastic packag-
ing, and pure light. The explicitly racist version o the purity ideal is not
accidentally but genealogically tied to these practices.
The harm comes when the concept and ideal o purity provides the
guise o innocence that acilitates xenophobic and ecologically unsound
identities and institutions. Purity tends to produce a particularly righteous,
isolated sel and a particularly hostile, hierarchical sel-other relation. This
means that white identity carries with it, rom its inception, an alienating,
alienated ethical and political orientation, while at the same time declar-ing itsel neutral and innocent. The extreme idealization o purity, even
when invoked in regard to ordinary things like hygiene, ood, and water, is
genealogically tied to repressive concepts such as racial purity. Hygiene is
not always problematic in itsel. But when it goes overboard and becomes
counterproductive, we need to ask ourselves why we still cling to it. Our
everyday valorization o purity reveals the extent to which, at bottom, we
have not gotten beyond certain racist, sexist, and other exclusionary hab-
its o thinking. This is an environmental issue because that preoccupation
refects an unhealthy sel-understanding in relation to our surroundings.
Purity ideals do not only make us sick physically, but also morally, be-
cause they reactivate the hierarchical subtexts o our American culture.
My purpose has not been to suggest that the entire history o white-
ness and race in the US can be simply and neatly reduced to purity ideals.
It is rather that the practical lie o purity as a conceptits actual mani-estation in our livesdemonstrates that purity is not the unquestionably
healthy virtue it is still presented as today. Just as ideas o race and racial
purity were debunked by biologists long beore the public would beginto question them, ideals o extreme hygienic purity linger, even fourish,
despite scientic evidence o their utility and harm. We are still enamored
with purity because, to some extent, our very sel-conceptions are at stake.
But those sel conceptions are sick. To the extent that we unrefectively up-
hold dubious values, we are less ree, and we lock ourselves into a status
quo social order. As inheritors o this racist, unhealthy culture, we are all
lovers o purity, and we are all responsible or rethinking this value.
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
23/28
noTes
1. By Americans, I am reerring to the mainstream as refected in US popularculture, politics, and media. As I will explain, I take the popular notion oAmericans to be implicitly white, although I do not believe that it is onlywhites in the US who participate in the concern or puritythat is why I saywe in general seem concerned with purity. Further, while I understand thatthis popular use o the term Americans obscures that people o many colorsand cultures inhabit the two American continents, it is part o my project toanalyze that culture that takes itsel to be Americanto analyze the ideo-logical hegemony o white mainstream US American culture. Finally, whilethere are certainly other nations and other cultures with recognizable purityissues, this project analyzes what I take to be the uniquely American varietyo the contemporary concern with purity.
2. One drop is the rule that, in traditional American legal and olk practice,has disqualied rom white status anyone who was supposed to have onedrop o non-white blood. Despite the act that this rule makes no sense bio-logically speaking (like other notions o racial categories), historically, no-tions o racial purity had to be meticulously guarded when questions aroseregarding where to draw racial lines. Plessy (o the landmark 1896 case Plessyv. Ferguson), who became amous by daring to occupy a white rail car, was7/8ths white and apparently looked white by many accounts. Around theturn o the century, what is known as the one-drop rule became establishedin US law to resolve such disputes. According to the one-drop rule, not only
would Plessy count as black, but so did the woman who, as recently as 1982,was deemed black by a Louisiana court even though she was 31/32ndswhite (Dominguez 1986, 15). The idea o one drop, then, reerred to thepresence in a persons ancestral line o one person who was (identied as)black. One drop o black blood, construed as one drop o pollution, is all ittakes to taint what is supposedly pure whiteness.
3. Such origins are assumed prepolitical in the sense that they are assumed tohave preceded social structures and relationships o dominance and subor-dination. This gives them an air o objective permanence. These are whatFoucault terms pure origins.
4. Biologist Lisa Weasel notes that a new paradigm o the immune system, sel v.non-sel, became predominant ollowing World War II, a time period in whichthe US political climate was marked by increasing xenophobia and isolation-ism. The theory is roughly this: the body somehow learns to identiy certaintypes o molecules as sel and others as non-sel. The ormer are toleratedand the latter are characterized as dangerous oreign invaders (2001, 29).Weasel notes that since that shit, war-like metaphors have been extremelycommon in the language (both popular and textbook) used to describe im-mune unctions o the body in deense o its essential sel. Consider this
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
24/28
example rom a National Geographic article: Besieged by a vast array oinvisible enemies, the human body enlists a remarkably complex corps ointernal bodyguards to battle the invaders (quoted in Weasel 2001, 30). Itseems that oreign, or even just dierent, in such a discourse comes to be
the equated with something hostilean element that should be expelled.5. The etymological root o the word air has to do with beauty. This came
to mean unblemished in terms o reedom rom moral stain, bias, or injus-tice, around 1340. The association with light-colored skin came along around1550.
6. On the fip side, we sometimes encounter the idea that civilization can bepolluting, even or those in power. The purity o domesticity is associatedwith the eminine, thereore too much civilization threatens to emasculate. Inreaction to this sort o pollution we saw Teddy Roosevelt take up his gun andget back to nature in the sense o conquering the wilderness. We have seenthis more recently with books like Robert Blys Iron John. In such a scenario,purity and pollution turn on a gender axis within the white upper classes, asopposed to turning on a class or race axis.
Sometimes the idea that civilized white culture is polluting does get ex-tended along a racial axis. In Wendell Berrys The Hidden Wound (1970),or example, whites are portrayed as disconnected, money-grubbing, violentpolluters, while Arican-Americans and Native Americans are portrayed aspure in the sense that, like noble savages, they are more connected to theland (which is a good thing according to Berrys particular brand o environ-
mentalism). Along the same lines, it is common to see Natives portrayed aspure in the sense that untouched wilderness is supposedly pure. Consider theimage o the crying Chie in the anti-pollution ad campaign, Keep AmericaBeautiul. Such a noble savage portrayal still relies on the dichotomy whichseparates groups along nature/culture lines, and does not challenge the statusquo o white dominance. The ascription o purity to the non-white groupin this case does not concede white power, perhaps because the raped land-scape and the crying Chie are eminized. As Spivak puts it, benevolent impe-rialism wishes to make room or the pure, native, authenticity o the Other,but authenticity is a notion that comes to us constructed by hegemonic
voices (1990, 61). It is constructed opposite a white subjectivity that is sup-posedly neutral and transparent. This white nostalgic lament misses that itssel-erasure comes rom a place o interest and privilege, and this xing o theothers identity secures that privilege.
7. This story also suggests a gender analysis related to the racial analysis thatis subject o this paper: our culture expects women in particular to disin-ect their homes and protect their amilies rom dirt and germs. In this sensewomen are the keepers o hygienic purity ideals.
8. Indeed, it is the same love o purity in the American psyche that the popularenvironmental movement tapped with its ocus on the word pollution to
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
25/28
describe ecological problems. Many ecologists themselves, on the other hand,have not ound the discourse o purity and pollution to be particularlyuseul when it comes to our relationship with nature.
referenCesAlexie, Sherman. 2004. Public lecture, 12 May, at University o Oregon, Eugene.
Anzalda, Gloria. 1999. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiz (2nd ed.). SanFrancisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Berry, Wendell. 1970. The Hidden Wound. Boston: Houghton Mifin.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits o Sex. NewYork: Routledge.
Cordova, Viola. 1997. ECOINDIAN: A Response to J. Baird Callicott in Ayaang-waamizin: The International Journal o Indigenous Philosophy 1: 3144.
Dominguez, Virginia. 1986. White by Denition: Social Classication in CreoleLouisiana. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Douglas, Mary. 1970. Purity and Danger: An Analysis o the Concepts o Pollu-tion and Taboo. Hammondsworth, UK: Penguin Books.
Dyer, Richard. 1997. White. London and New York: Routledge.
Fanon, Franz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann.New York: Grove Press.
Ferrier, Catherine. 2001. Bottled Water: Understanding a Social Phenomenon,a report commissioned by the World Wildlie Fund. Available online at http://www.panda.org/downloads/reshwater/bottled_water.pd (accessed 13 April
2003).Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology o Knowledge, trans. Rupert Sawyer.
New York: Pantheon.
Foucault, Michel. 1984. What is Enlightenment? In The Foucault Reader, ed.Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon.
Frankenberg, Ruth. 1993. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Constructiono Whiteness. Minneapolis: University o Minnesota Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 1961. Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Stra-chey. New York: WW Norton.
General Electric Company, USA. 19972002.Reveal Home Page. http://www.ger-eveal.com/reveal/index.html (accessed 18 November 2002).
Greenbaum, Leonard. 1966. The Hound and Horn: The History o a LiteraryQuarterly. The Hague: Mouton.
Heneghan, Bridget. 2003. Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race inthe Antebellum Imagination.Jackson, MS: University Press o Mississippi.
hooks, bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South EndPress.
Kolata, Gina. 2001. Kill All the Bacteria!: Extreme Hygiene New York Times,7 January.
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
26/28
Kristeva, Julia. 1982. The Powers o Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S.Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lugones, Mara. 1994. Purity, Impurity, and Separation. Signs: Journal oWomen in Culture and Society 19: 458479.
Mills, Charles. 2000. Do Black Men Have a Moral Duty to Marry BlackWomen? in Refections: An Anthology o Arican-American Philosophy, eds.William Hardy and James Montmarquet. Stamord, CT: Wadsworth.
Newitz, Annalee, and Matthew Wray. 1997. White Trash: Race and Class in Amer-ica. New York: Routledge.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1989 [1887]. On the Genealogy o Morals, trans. WalterKaumann. New York: Vintage Books.
Procter and Gamble. 1883. What a Cake o Soap Will Do, advertising pamphletor Ivory Soap. [Can be viewed on the webpage Soap Trivia, Chandlers
Soaps. http://www.chandlerssoaps.com/soap-trivia.html (accessed 29 October2002)].
Procter and Gamble. 1998a. Ivory Product History Page.http://www.ivory.com/history.htm (accessed 22 October 2002).
Procter and Gamble. 1998b. Ivory Soap Home Page. http://www.ivory.com (ac-cessed 22 October 2002).
Rowlands, Barbara. 2002. Clean Living in Asthma News 68. Available online athttp://www.asthma.org.uk/about/an082.php (accessed 31 January 2003).
Shiva, Vandana. 2002. Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Prot. Cam-bridge, MA: South End Press.
Spivak, Gayatri. 1990. Questions o Multi-culturalism. In The PostcolonialCritic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym. New York:Routledge.
Tucker, Susan. 1988. Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Work-ers and their Employers in the Segregated South. New York: Schocken Books
Wasserstrom, Richard. 2001. Racism and Sexism. In Race andRacism, ed. Ber-nard Boxill. New York: Oxord University Press.
Weasel, Lisa. 2001. Dismantling the Sel/Other Dichotomy in Science: Towards aFeminist Model o the Immune System. Hypatia 16(1): 2744.
Willis, Susan. 1991. A Primer or Daily Lie. London and New York: Routledge.Zack, Naomi. 2001. American Mixed Race: The U.S. 2000 Census and RelatedIssues. Harvard Black Letter Law Journal17: 3346.
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
27/28
ETHICS& THE ENVIRONMENT, 15(1) 2010 ISSN: 1085-6633
NOTES ON CONTRIbuTORS
Elisa Aaltola, Ph. D., is a Lecturer in Philosophy (East Finland University).
In her research, she has ocused on animal ethics and, more generally,
animal philosophy. Besides numerous papers in international journals, she
has also written a Finnish book on animal ethics (Elinten moraalinen
arvo, 2004). E-mail: [email protected]
Dana Berthold completed her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University oOregon in 2005, and now lives in the Columbia River Gorge. She works
or a conservation oriented non-proft, where she is aorded plenty o op-
portunities to play in the dirt. E-mail: [email protected]
Thomas Crowley recently completed a yearlong Fulbright ellowship in
India. His research ocused on the intersection o ethics, ecology and cul-
ture in the Indian context. He has previously received research grants to
interview prominent ecophilosophers in Norway and to analyze dierent
orms o ecotourism in Costa Rica. He has written articles on the legacyo Arne Naess and on the ecological worldviews o Rabindranath Tagore
and Knut Hamsun. E-mail: [email protected]
Andrew Fiala, Ph.D. is Director o the Ethics Center and Proessor o
Philosophy at Caliornia State University, Fresno. He is the editor o Phi-
losophy in the Contemporary World and author o several books, includ-
ing Public War, Private Conscience (London: Continuum 2010). E-mail:[email protected]
Robert Kirkman is Associate Proessor o Philosophy, Science and Technol-ogy in the School o Public Policy at the Georgia Institute o Technology.
He is author oSkeptical Environmentalism: The Limits of Philosophyand Science (Indiana, 2002) and The Ethics of Metropolitan Growth:
8/2/2019 BERTHOLD- Tidy Whiteness
28/28
Reproducedwithpermissionof thecopyrightowner. Further reproductionprohibitedwithoutpermission.